OF RELIGION 



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THE ARTS OF LIFE. 

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OF RELIGION 



m)t arts of life 


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RELIGION 




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RICHARD ROGERS BOWKER 




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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 


HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 


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1903 



THE LIBRARY 0F 
CONGRESS, 


Two Copies Received 


APR 18 1903 


Copyrignt Entry 
CLASS ^ XXc. No. 


COPY B. 






COPYRIGHT, 1900 AND I903, 

BY RICHARD ROGERS BOWKER. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 




OF RELIGION 

'ELIGION, binding anew the 

material with the spiritual, ful- Religion the 
fills man, making him whole. ArforLife 
It is therefore the supreme art 
of life. To heal men, to make 
them whole, to call them to health, whole- 
ness, holiness — for these words are all one 
word — has ever been the end of religion. 
The man of whole life, integer vitae^ sang the 
Roman poet, fears not, and is conqueror. 
Religion sanctions and sanctifies life, is its 
binding force. What, then, is religion } 

To this, the question of the ages, sect 
makes answer with creed, Christianity with What is 
Christ, the Jew with his One and Only Je- ^^1^2^°^? 
hovah, Buddhists with the Noble Path and 
Mahometans with the teachings of Al Koran ; 
priest, ritualist, puritan, each after his man- 
ner ; while the reverent agnostic asks if he 
may not also be religious. The man of twi- 
light times — **and in his soul was twilight" 
— our far forefather, like the savage of to- 
day, saw in the lengthening shadows of the 
setting sun, in the voices of the dark and 
of the storm, in dawn and cloud and stream 
and wood, in the mysteries of nature and of 

S 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

death, something beyond this material and 
present life, and imaged a Great Spirit, in an 
unseen world where dwelt the spirits of the 
dead, in worship or fear of whom he ruled 
his life, guided by medicine-man or primitive 
priest. Here was the early development of 
The reli- the religious instinct, from which in the pro- 
fns^hict gress of mankind was evolved, despite con- 
fusion of creed and of ceremonial, a wider 
recognition of Supreme Law and a higher 
thought of God. Throughout the earlier re- 
ligions, — nature-worship, rites to ancestors, 
idolatry, the multifarious gods of India, the 
personification of manifestations and of at- 
tributes in Egyptian, Greek, Teutonic mytho- 
logy, — modern thought finds evidence of a 
recognition, if dimly or not at all by the peo- 
ple, yet oftentimes clearly by the priests, of 
a Supreme Spirit, the Only God of Abraham, 
Rewarder of good to the spirits of the dead, 
in some cults combated by a World Spirit 
or Evil One, who was in most theogonies a 
lesser deity to be overcome by the Good in 
the final judgment. In these three concepts, 
of a quasi human God, of an after-life of men 
in an unseen world, of the relation of the 
ethical aspects of life to the Unseen, a mod- 
ern evolutionist sees the essential features 
6 



OF RELIGION 

of religion. But a wider thought of religion Universal 
would not exclude the essentially religious ^^^^^P^s 
spirit, denied by temperament or habit of 
intellect the conviction of a personal God, 
whose perception of an after-life is in hope 
rather than in belief, which nevertheless 
recognizes in the universe a moral order, a 
Power that makes for rightness, in coordina- 
tion with the higher or spiritual nature of 
man and affording a spiritual or supera-mate- 
rial sanction for right conduct. 

That this world is ruled by righteousness 
is a thought so deep in the race that it is The Rule of 
found at the roots of language. Our very ^^^ ^ 
words "morals'' and "ethics'* mean customs, 
that is to say, customs are based on a sense 
of rightness and fitness, and from them our 
code of morals or ethics, our practice of right, 
has developed. In the wider sense, religion 
is the recognition of the supremacy of the 
higher life, the spiritual, over the lower life, 
the material, which gives spiritual sanction to 
right living and sanctifies life. For the soul, 
the spirit, must have its supreme place in 
life. 

Thus religion, as an art of life, is the art 
which cultivates spirituality, which develops 
7 



The Su- 
premacy of 
Spirit 



The work- 
ing Ground 
of all Re- 
ligions 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

character on the spiritual side, which uplifts 
duty by love. Conscience is the chisel by 
which the divine touch carves from the mar- 
ble of human being the lovely statue of the 
perfected soul. It is the building upward and 
outward, by good thoughts and good works, 
from the lower self into the higher, the image 
of God, the ideal. Thus we realize, in the 
higher Christianity, the ideal which was the 
aim of the Greeks, but which they achieved 
in physical rather than spiritual perfection. 
It is for us to know, to have, to rejoice in 
both. Spirit rules body, God self, good evil, 
right wrong, in a working and resultful opti- 
mism which is faith. Morals is the bed-rock 
of religion. 

The geologist may not get near to the 
molten center of this earth, or the religious 
thinker penetrate the mysteries of the First 
Cause, but each nevertheless has sufficient 
field in the working ground of all mankind. 
In that eternal round, the Unknown, God, 
Humanity, the Unknown, it is not given us 
to know the infinite answer to the infinite 
questions. Whence ? Whither ? Why ? — but 
the Here, that is our affair. And on this 
ground of morals, in the analysis of working 
religion as an art of life, there is a widening 
8 



OF RELIGION 

agreement among all religions and all sects. 
At last Christians begin to learn that if God 
is our Father, and Jesus the Elder Brother 
to us all, then we must all be brothers one to 
another — through Christian sect and non- 
Christian majority; and to learn this is to 
make much the essentials and to make little 
the differences of religion, to live a true per- 
sonal life in harmony and godly love. 

And it is only on this basis that religion 
and morality have meaning. They together The Uplift 
are one, and make together the supreme art °^ ^°^® 
of life. The idea of duty, the conception of 
love — in these, life flowers. Herein the 
fierce warfare of every man for himself is 
tempered into love in fellowship, in friend- 
ship, race-love. Herein the strongest pas- 
sion of the body is redeemed and transfigured 
into love in marriage, sex-love. Herein sins 
themselves are transfigured into stepping- 
stones that lead heavenward, in God-love. 
Man is religious in essence : on the ethical 
idea all religion builds, on the idea of spirit- 
uality all religion soars, as the cathedral is 
crowned by its spire. Duty and love — these 
are feet and wings of the man spiritual. The 
religion which says. We cannot know God, 
worships the race and woman ; the religion 

9 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

which says, We do not know, accepts the 
command that man love his neighbor as him- 
self. 

There is one confession to which the Chris- 
The Limita- tian, the positivist, the agnostic must alike 
Mind° come, in negative agreement of human limi- 

tations. The Hindoos rested the earth on 
the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant, 
and so on and so on. But — beyond ? The 
human mind stops here. Inspiration cannot 
tell it the secret, because there is no faculty 
which can know. The Infinite confounds us. 
One of two opposites must be true — but 
the human mind cannot conceive of either. 
There must have been beginning of Time, 
or no beginning. There must be end of 
Space, or no end. There must always have 
been Matter, or Matter must have been cre- 
ated out of nothing. The child asks, Who 
was God's father ? We ask the same ques- 
tions as the child. For us there is no an- 
swer ; there can be none. Infinity is exten- 
sion of which every point is a center: the 
finite mind rejects this as a mathematical 
contradiction. 

The human mind cannot tkink a begin- 
ning, or no beginning : it cannot tkznk an 
lo 



OF RELIGION 

end or no end, Yet one of these must be The Un- 
true. Eternity, Infinity, a First or uncaused *^^^ ^^ ® 
Cause, it can name, but it cannot conceive 
of them, or their absence, or their contraries. 
These be mysteries. The eye cannot see 
sound, neither can man reason of things be- 
yond reason. That we cannot think either 
of two alternatives, one of which must be 
the truth, is a sufficient commentary on the 
limitations of thought, and the final proof of 
humility. Beyond, reason goes not : here 
the Christian rests his doubt, the unbeliever 
his challenge. If we cannot know God, 
neither can we deny his being. It is the 
fool who saith in his heart : There is no God ; 
what knowledge hath he by which he may 
deny } The pantheist quibbles with himself : 
his Soul of Nature is not less unthinkable. 

Yet in these days it is often the wise man, 
the unselfish and earnest thinker, who can- Credo or 
not truly say, "I believe." His credo has Spero 
become spero. He will hope. He cannot by 
searching find out God : he hesitates to sur- 
render reason to an elusive, perhaps delusive, 
faculty beyond reason : he will only reason 
about and recognize the limits of his reason, 
and, with hope, set himself to apply the past 
II 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

to a present which is making the future — 
whether the future be his or not his, infinite 
or finite. For such a man there can be no 
hesitancy of fear ; there is no place here for 
the coward. The man of science must see 
what his sight shows him. He must believe 
not in Belief but in Truth. He must inquire 
of facts, not threaten them with fear of con- 
sequences. Here true service comes only 
from that unshrinking sight which discerns, 
and that unfaltering will which asserts, de- 
spite prejudice or tradition, those elements 
of permanent result that are to make the fu- 
ture. Shrinking conservatism may not stay 
him ; it is not for him to bury his face in the 
darkened temples of the gods and cry out 
against the worshiper under the sunlight or 
the starlight of the revealing heavens. He 
shall try faith, that faith be found faithful, 
and live. 

Indeed, in the wide sense, it is the province 

The Search- of the scientific investigator to assure faith. 

Fatfh^^^^ He has no fear lest, fighting for good, in line 
with truth, he haply be found fighting against 
Him who is Giver of Good and Author of 
Truth. There is nothing more skeptical, 
more irreligious, more essentially atheistic, 
than that religion, falsely so-called, now pass- 

12 



OF RELIGION 

ing away, which flings Nature in the face of 
God, which makes its God illogical, inhuman, 
ungodly, a creator at odds with his creation, 
a contradiction of terms. There is nothing 
more promotive of real and abiding faith, 
more religious in binding men with good, 
more vitally godly, than that science which 
presents one harmony of Nature and of Gos- 
pel, working together, through convertive 
evil, into higher good ; which leads to a re- 
conciling faith that when it finds God finds 
Him law-abiding, humane, truly divine, a logi- 
cal God. Bravery is the best evidence of 
faith. 

Science, we hear over and over, is skepti- 
cal and disastrous. If it be skeptical, it is The Sane- 
disastrous, for no people that believes not science 
ever does greatly. It is faith that moves 
mountains. But this earnest questioning that 
seeks the True and the Good in religion, in 
morals, or in knowledge, — this is not skepti- 
cism, in the ill sense in which the word is 
commonly heard. Skepticism is the essence 
of negation. It is the chronic condition of 
corrosive doubt, doubt not simply of God but 
of good. In the '^religious '' philosophy that 
gives evil, or its incarnation, the practical 
supremacy in life, it finds its strongest type. 
13 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

But when Science, in a spirit not of doubt 
but of seeking, brings to us with her ques- 
tionings the strongest sanction natural ethics 
can receive, she brings to us also new stimu- 
lus of faith. That sanction is the simple 
fact of the eternity of influence. Every mo- 
tion alters in its degree the relations of the 
universe forever. In this sense nothing dies, 
nothing is lost. Responsibility is infinite. 
Science confirms the sanction of religion ; 
the one approves what the other has fore- 
said. 

There can be no greater mock of a real 
Fatalism religion, a true God, a living faith, than the 
irreligious fatalism which finds its culmination on the 
one hand in the dull serenity of the Maho- 
metan devotee, on the other in the lurid pre- 
destination of a Jonathan Edwards. The 
logical result is fatal ease of conscience — 
the sensuality of the Turk, or that reckless 
indifference to unavoidable sin, the dreadful 
results of which among his flock drove Ed- 
wards from his Northampton parish after 
"the Great Awakening" had done its awful 
work. Ever the human soul revolts against 
the metaphysical chains which deny its free- 
dom. Predestination we know indeed, in 
14 



OF RELIGION 

science, as heredity, environment, circum- 
stance, which make tendency ; but tendency 
is not all — there is something within which 
can direct, convert, utilize tendency. We 
know it ; we feel it ; we build all practical life 
upon it. *'Sir," said Dr. Johnson, **we know 
our will is free, and there 's an end on 't." 
^' Reconcile the foreknowledge and the fore- 
ordination of God with the free will of man } 
Your own conscience,'' — answered Mr. 
Apollo Lyon to the would-be Devil-puzzler. 
It is this, in the finality, on which all prac- 
tical religion is based. 

In progress, much comes, much goes, much 
remains. The old " evidences '' of the Chris- The old 
tian faith, which through the centuries have 
raised more doubts than they have solved, 
give place to a larger faith and a wider hope. 
One by one they have gone, but in their 
place greater has come. The consensus gen- 
tiuniy the majority vote for Christ, so to speak, 
was an argument that meant much until it 
was met by the arithmetical fact of the wider 
vogue of the earlier Buddha and of the later 
Mahomet. The Christian who builded on 
this ground found it swept away as sand, 
and his faith with it. So long as all reli- 
gions but Christianity were "heathen,'' — 

IS 



Evidences 



Evidences 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

works of the devil, — so long it was evident 
that the devil had the better of God in His 
world. 

But modern investigation, in the true spirit 
The new of science, has opened our eyes. We witness 
the evolution of religion, from a lower to a 
higher thought of God, from a lower to a 
higher conception of good, from a lower to 
a higher ethical standard. And evolution 
itself teaches us that as all appetites, func- 
tions, and instincts prefigure something in 
the objective environment which answers to 
their subjective demand, as hunger implies 
food, and thirst drink, the eye light and the 
ear sound, sex-love woman for man and man 
for woman, so there must be answer to 
man's spiritual instinct, his appetite for reli- 
gion, his thirst for God, his desire for a 
future life. Thus science confirms and 
broadens faith. In all religions we see God, 
adapting Himself through human leadership 
to humankind, according to the need of tribe 
and time. In the great books of the great 
faiths we read Gospels only less noble than 
those of our own Bible, the Book of Books. 
Even in the stocks and stones of the savage 
we find symbols of a Great Spirit, a God 
dimly seen by dim men. In due time came 
i6 



OF RELIGION 

the Christ, son of God, God in man, divine 
or human, to vouchsafe to the higher races 
of mankind at once the simplest and highest 
of religions, the essence of all religion, in 
whose Light we have Life. 

So, also, the letter, " which killeth," is no 
longer the foundation of faith. A reverent The Use of 
criticism, tracing the evolution of our reli- "^^^^^"^ 
gion from the fierce Jahveh of the nomad 
Israelites to the loving Father of all men, 
has brushed away much legendary tradition, 
much repulsive teaching of a rude race, and 
taught us to reject the human weaknesses of 
the writers and to reverence all the more 
the spiritual strength which has made our 
Bible the Book of Books. And with " verbal 
inspiration" has been swept away also the 
confusion of creeds built upon contradictory 
proof-texts, erroneous translations, and verbal 
misconceptions ; the whole fabric of verbal 
religion has indeed been whirled away into 
thin air. 

Even the miraculous birth, the immaculate 
conception, which has in our own day been The mystic 
carried yet a step further as a foundation- ^^^^^ 
stone of one great church, is seen in a new 
light. In the dim and shadowy days of our 
17 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

far fathers, before writing, every hero was 
miraculously born ; and in later ages, about 
Buddha, as Founder of a Faith, centered the 
very legends associated with the birth and 
childhood or our own Jesus. This discov- 
ery destroyed nothing. To the true disciple 
it confirmed faith, because it showed how 
the ever-recurring yearnings of humanity, 
forming themselves into loving legends, wove 
this wreath of miracle with which to greet 
the son of God, or son of man, who was to 
bring God down to man, to lift man up to 
God. 

The miracle of this Birth, be it truth or le- 
All Birth is gend, is patterned indeed by every birth, the 
Miracle daily miracle of new being. That the seed of 
a flower, the acorn of a tree, should contain 
within its tiny self the laws, principles, and 
tendencies which define it as itself, which 
from one or another set of cells of starch de- 
velop the simple blade of green grass, the 
tasseled ear of corn with its mathematically 
arranged kernels, the white and shining lily, 
the exactly patterned color of the pansy, the 
parti-colored tulip, the spired poplar, or the 
spreading oak, — this would pass belief were 
it not the common experience of our daily 
life. Said Linnaeus, as he watched a blossom 
i8 



OF RELIGION 

unfold : *' I saw God in His glory passing 
near me, and bowed my head in worship." 
So, too, the egg of insect or of bird, — of the 
queen bee, with its passionate instincts de- 
veloped in the chrysalis; the duck, whose 
young take to the water from their shells ; 
the pigeon, homeing true from fields far and 
unknown, — each is a mystery and a miracle. 
And at last these culminate in the final mir- 
acle of the human life, — bodily form and 
spiritual character fashioned from the parent 
forms of generations and ages before, min- 
gling and commingling in forms ever new 
and ever old. All birth is miracle. 

Life, indeed, has two gates from the un- 
known, and both are miracles. The gate The Gate of 
which opens on mysterious hinges for birth ^^^*" 
is patterned by the mystic gate of death. We 
depart into, as we came from, the Unknown. 
As to immortality, it is not given us to know. 
The Christian minister, at the bedside of the 
dying or beside the grave of the dead, can 
only hope. He may not verify or prove. 
And Paul, in that glorious outburst of reli- 
gious fervor in which the human imagination 
reaches its highest flight, does not prove im- 
mortality : his splendid analogy falters at the 
very heart of the question, for it is because 

19 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

the spiritual body lacks that bridge in the 
material life with the natural body which the 
risen grain has in its seed that the doubter 
questions. As we tread in the mists of morn- 
ing a great bridge suspended above a mighty 
river and see the curve of the cables sweeping 
down from the seen tower, left uncompleted 
to our vision in the veiling cloud, we scarcely 
need the witness of returning travelers to 
prove to us that there is a tower on the far- 
ther shore to which the chain ascends in com- 
pleted curve. Yet without this evidence we 
cannot say that analogy is proof, or confound 
the doubter who says that this may be a 
'* cantilever " balanced on one tower only and 
ending in the mists. On this bridge of life, 
over which all must pass, and on which there 
is no returning, we can but press on to a goal 
of hope. 

Yet natural religion points to what revealed 
The Resur- religion asserts. The story of the Resurrec- 
tion, be it vision or allegory or literal truth, 
voices and answers to the great hope of our 
race. It is, in a sense, no greater miracle than 
those wonder-workings of risen and ascending 
life which we see about us every day ; yet to 
the earnest doubter, like questioning Thomas, 
the proof may not suffice for an event so con- 
20 



rection 



OF RELIGION 

trary to our experience of life. The reason 
that "they would not believe though one rose 
from the dead'* is that questioning minds 
would require corroboration and cumulative 
proof that the witness of whom Jesus speaks 
in the parable ^^^ risen from the dead. That 
which required most proof, they might say, 
had least. But though to orthodox believers 
the Resurrection may be the central fact of 
Christianity, it is not the sole fact, and the Not the 
teachings of Jesus, before the Crucifixion, ^°^® ^^^^ 
harmonized in our recognition of the imper- 
fect media through which they have come 
down to us, are in themselves a sufficing gos- 
pel. And when the great Apostle to the Gen- 
tiles, whose mission was to include within 
Christianity all mankind, cries, in confusion 
of the Sadducees who had the same incer- 
titude as to a future life that a;ppears in the 
Old Testament : ** If Christ be not risen, 
your faith is vain. . . let us eat and drink, for 
to-morrow we die,*' he limits Christianity by 
basing it on a single fact which many minds 
cannot accept, in the cardinal error of the 
sectary who asserts that if his truth is not 
the truth, there is no truth. 

There are two immortalities — one certain, 
one possible, — the one of influence, the other 

21 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

The two im- of identity. We know, for science assures us, 
mortalities ^j^^^. ^^^ deeds live forever. Let us heed and 

hope — for the inspiration of both is the same. 
And if we ask why, if human life is immortal, 
animal life is not.-* why the intelligent and 
kindly dog or horse, the companion of man, 
may not survive as well as the man brute, 
again the answer is, it is not given us to know. 
If there is truth in the theory of selective im- 
mortality, that a soul which earns spiritual- 
ity earns also a future life of the spirit, while 
the evil or the brutish may die, this all the 
more is inspiration and sanction for right 
living. 

The lesser miracles of the ministry are not 
The Mira- without their correspondence in the large 
miracle of living. The water made wine, be 
it fact or phantasy, is not more wonderful than 
the chemist's daily miracle. An atom of car- 
bon from our hearth, an atom of hydrogen 
from a drop of water, an atom of nitrogen 
from a particle of air, these together, no more, 
make the molecule of prussic acid which, by 
another miracle, instantly destroys life. An 
atom of oxygen to each makes them again 
earth, water, air ! So, too, the miracles of 
healing are not without witness in our day. 

22 



cles of Na- 
ture 



OF RELIGION 

Daily we see the mind dominating the body, 
working in it evil or good, the will command- 
ing the nerves and they in turn the mus- 
cles, courage resisting contagion, fear inviting 
cholera, cowardice producing physical effects 
on the eve of battle, a thought bringing the 
blush to the cheek or congesting the blood in 
other parts of the body, the spiritual elevation 
of the martyr defying pain, visions as of Our 
Lady of Lourdes stimulating recovery, and 
the mind-cure, despite all vagaries, doing real 
service to humankind by teaching the sub- 
jecting of subordinate matter to supreme 
spirit. 

It is indeed not as wonder-workings, but 
as exceptions to law, that miracles challenge Miracles as 
modern belief. Early man, unknowing of ^"^Law^^^^ 
law, was widely credulous : he saw the un- 
seen, spake with the dead, and expected 
Deity to reverse nature. But credulity is 
not belief. Belief requires proof, and re- 
views evidence. We can even reverse the 
seeming evidence of the senses. Incredulous 
at first that the world is round, that the earth 
moves, that the blood courses through our 
bodies, that one form of life is evolved by far 
steps from another, that the forces of na- 
ture and the sensations of the body are but 

23 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

modes of motion, man came to belief in each 
of these seeming contradictions because each 
ranged itself at last in line with law. The 
modern mind accepts with rightful readiness 
evidence in accord with "established facts'* 
and the observed order of nature, and as 
rightly it requires more and cumulative proof 
of what is contrary to experience, a seeming 
exception to law. But as to this order of 
nature, we do not know all ; we have much 
to learn. 

The very possibility of human life depends 
Exceptions on two facts, seemingly quite exceptional and 
Life^^^^"^^^ out of the order of nature. Water as it freezes 
expands instead of contracts with cold, so 
that ice floats and by forming on the surface 
protects the fluid beneath; else our rivers 
would freeze solid from the bottom, and in 
winter the flow of the earth's blood would 
cease. Though oxygen and nitrogen com- 
bine in wide range of chemical equivalence, 
air is a merely mechanical mixture of these 
two elements, so that the lungs absorb the 
oxygen freely, without the waste of force 
necessary to dissociate it from a chemical 
combination. The wonderful law of the dif- 
fusion of gases by which the products of com- 
bustion from our lungs and our chimneys are 
24 



OF RELIGION 

in turn harmlessly re-absorbed into the air 
seems an exception contrary to the great law 
of gravitation. A Shakespeare, a Napoleon, 
an Edison, is an exception in the order of 
nature not to be accounted for ; nor can any 
lesser Shakespeare, the creator of any liter- 
ature, explain whence or how his thoughts 
came. 

The order of nature is itself a miracle, a The Order 
wonder-working, and seems not so only be- Mimcle^^ ^ 
cause we do not consider. It is often above 
and beyond sense. So the searcher for truth 
may not believe the miracles of the Bible ; 
he may say with sincere judgment that they 
are to him not proven ; but he cannot deny 
them. The Christian and the agnostic may 
in this measure agree. 

But what basis remains then for **reli- The 
gion '' in such agreement, — an agreement on R^jf^on^^ 
mysteries, in an Origin forever unknowable, 
in a First Cause revealed without absolute 
certainty, in an Immortality which is a hope 
never proven, in a Gospel which partakes of 
the fallibility of man, in a Christ who may be 
God and may be man, in miracles and evi- 
dences which may prove all or nothing. In- 
deed, there remains the essence of all reli- 
25 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

gions, in the simplest, the purest, the noblest, 
the highest form in which religion has been 
vouchsafed to the most spiritual races of man- 
kind. Thou shalt love God — or the Good, 
O skeptic ! — with all thy heart and soul and 
mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. This is 
the law and the prophets. Here is broad 
ground on which we may agree with all lovers 
of good, and within which each may work 
out his own beliefs, provided he damn no 
other's. 

For belief itself is in large measure a mat- 
Tempera- ter of temperament, of innate tendency and 
BeHef^^^ mental equipment. There are those to whom 
it is not given to believe, however much they 
desire to do good and to know God. Shall 
the blind be condemned because they see 
not ? A loving God will not deny mercy to 
His creatures whom He has not endowed with 
the gift of belief. The student of science, 
who is above all a student of the divine order, 
develops his mental powers nevertheless in 
the direction of proof, and God has not per- 
mitted Himself to be proved. Proof stops 
short of the First Cause. God is veiled. 
Let the Christian then lament the limitations 
which keep the man of science on one side of 
the veil, but let him not condemn the man 
26 



OF RELIGION 

nor impeach God. Let him regret imperfec- 
tions, if he will, but let him not dare to pass 
sentence as of God. On the other hand, sus- 
pense, not skepticism, is the attitude of sci- 
ence. Reverence is its true virtue, denial is 
its caricature. Goethe's Mephisto is the 
spirit that denies. Moreover, the man of 
science, above all men, knows the meaning of 
art. He preaches the cultivation of habit. 
Let it be, therefore, his habit of mind to cul- 
tivate himself toward that art of life which 
we call religion. 

For science itself meets the same limita- 
tions as religion. The problem of a First Limitations 
Cause, of the beginnings of time and space °^ Science 
and matter, of the finite and the infinite, are 
also its problems. No man living ever hopes 
that any human being will ever see an 
"atom;*' yet it is absolutely visible to the 
eye of faith. It is counted, sized, weighed ; 
it is the foundation of scientific reasoning. 
The atom, indivisible, must have size, yet 
can have no size. So also the "ether; *' infi- 
nitely tenuous, it must be infinitely dense. 
Both are contradictions to our sense. What 
is true of the infinitely little is true of the 
infinitely great. The beam of light which 
27 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

tells to the man of science the story of the 
stars appeals to his faith rather than to his 
sight. Between the human organism which 
sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels, and the 
organism of nature, the physical universe, 
there is a great gulf fixed, and the vibra- 
tions which come from one to the other, the 
angels of the world physical, can be caught 
and interpreted only by those mind-faculties 

— the metaphysical, intellectual, or spiritual 

— which are themselves a mystery of mys- 
teries, a miracle of miracles. Scientific rea- 
soning is in itself a process of faith, building 
bridges from the seen to the unseen. 

Why then has there been conflict between 
Science science and religion ? For two reasons — 
J?^^* ^^^^" one of habit, and one of essence. It is the 
process of the man of science to doubt, to 
question, to deny, to reject ; thus only he 
obtains his fine metal. Truth. It is the 
method of the professor of religion to "be- 
lieve without question ; " in his habit of 
mind, to question is to deny, and denial is 
the crime against the Holy Spirit which is 
the unpardonable sin. To the man of sci- 
ence, this is intellectual dishonesty, moral 
blindfoldness, treason to Truth, an impeach- 
ment of God. The virtue of virtues of the 
28 



tion 



OF RELIGION 

one is the vice of vices of the other. Sci- 
ence is here in the right : a real God, who is 
Truth, must honor the searching which He 
has implanted in His own, and the ministers 
of religion who have preached a gospel of 
blindness instead of His Gospel of Light, 
these are they who have sinned against the 
Holy Spirit of Truth. 

But there seems to be between the faith 
of science and the faith of religion one The Gulf 
abyss, of profound depth, reaching to the scirncrand 
very center of all things and of all thoughts. Religion 
Science is sure, religion is not sure, in the 
continuity and exactness of the evidences. 
The seeker in science finds that in the physi- 
cal universe like causes produce like effects, 
and he reads the history of the past, the con- 
ditions of the present, the prophecy of the 
future, in clear, sure light. The omnipre- 
sent, eternal force of nature never fails in the 
physical justness, exactness, of its effects ; it 
is on this that scientific reasoning builds its 
certain conclusions. The man of science 
asks why, if religion is true, this is not true 
of religion .'^ Why does theology speak with 
uncertain witness f Why has religion pro- 
duced conflicts, sects, wars, martyrs } Why 
has Christ's teaching, if it is the final Truth, 
29 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

not prevailed in Christendom and among all 
mankind ? 

And we face here also the practical work- 
The Pro- ing problem that ever confronts man — the 
biem of Evil pj-Qbiem of evil. Men of science will say 
that in science there is no evil. Why then 
this awful dilemma in religion ? If God is 
omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, why 
does evil exist in the moral world ? Why 
should a God, all-knowing, all-loving, all- 
powerful, permit in His world and among 
His creatures, these seeds of ill? Why 
should there be implanted in mankind pas- 
sions, many and raging, to yield to which is 
the swift act of a moment, but which reap 
their harvest in the misery of a whole life 
and in the misery of lives to come ? Why do 
good motives produce ill ? Why are the sins 
of the fathers visited upon the children in- 
stead of upon the sinner ? Why does an 
omnipotent God permit evil in conflict with 
His good ? 

The tradition of Adam's fall is a trivial 
Religious solution which common-sense religion ac- 
Difficulties ^^p^3 Qj^iy ^g ^ parable. The blind theology 

of an Edwards, building a diabolic ogre of 

divine Justice, which wreaks infinite ven- 

30 



OF RELIGION 

geance as the fit punishment of the rejection 
of infinite love, shutting its eyes and seahng 
its Hps against the logical denial writ into this 
contradictory image of God, offers but an 
ostrich-like solution. And the doctrine, as 
old as the Manichaeans, as new as the Chris- 
tian Scientists, that evil or error is that 
which is not good or God, whether the doc- 
trine takes the form of belief in a dual prin- 
ciple in the government of the universe, or 
of denial of the reality of evil because it is 
not of God, is not less unsatisfying to 
logical thought. The darkness is but the Darkness 
absence of light, the shadow conditioned on ^^^ Light 
the interposition of our earth itself before 
the sun, our source of light ; yet it is a fact 
inherent in the constitution of the universe 
and the great negative factor in each day's 
life. To define darkness with Edwards as 
produced by the sun, or with the Manichaean 
as caused by the earth, or with Eddy as non- 
existent because not of the sun, is equally an 
imperfect solution. To say that God, know- 
ing all, knows not evil, and therefore that 
evil does not exist, is to deny a fact of life 
with juggle of words. Men know evil and 
pain and darkness ; if God does not, then 
men know more than God, and God is not 

31 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

all-knowing. Neither the In-justice of the 
All-good in the Edwards theology, nor the 
Ignore-ance of the All-knowing in the Eddy- 
theology, solves the problem of evil. 

But we have lines of leading. We know 
Evil an inci- that the choice of good, as against the temp- 
^^^^ tations of evil, makes for good and produces 

character. The unspeakable anguish, through 
five years of isolation from all mankind, of 
the living martyr on Devil's Isle, the victim 
of colossal and unmitigated injustice, an 
agony in itself evil and only evil, is redeemed 
in the shining service to justice, to his coun- 
try, to the world, which the faith, the cour- 
age, the patriotism, the devotion of that 
heroic soul have emblazoned on the black 
background of an infamous wrong never to be 
forgotten or forgiven. We see also that evil 
is sometimes not in itself pain, but a lower 
viewed from a higher condition, the shed 
chrysalis of the caterpillar seen from the 
wings of the butterfly. The family life in 
the humble cottage or in the tenement of the 
slums, deprivation as seen from the richer 
and fuller and freer life, has nevertheless its 
redeeming delight. We know also that the 
whole process of development, evolving good, 
involves evil. We ask why God could not 
32 



OF RELIGION 

have created perfect man in a perfect world, 
and we answer our question from our daily 
experience that the highest result comes 
from upward struggle. The mountain-top, 
in its fullest glory, must have achievement. 
The cloud of evil veils the sunshine of good. 
Also, the man of science is here guilty of 
an imperfect generalization. He is himself Science has 
sure only in the elementary field in which he ^^^ ^^^^ 
can fully know or completely control all the 
causes and conditions of his result. Thus 
elementary chemistry may almost be ac- 
counted an exact science and a certain art. 
But where he passes into complex condi- 
tions, as from inorganic to organic chemistry, 
he is no longer sure, for he no longer knows 
or controls all the conditions. A problem 
of evil begins to confront him. He starts a 
process of fermentation, and his bread or his 
beer turns sour. He administers a drug to 
the human system, and the results confound 
him. Thus doctors, who are men of applied 
science, notoriously disagree ; and the fading 
conflicts of religion are not more virulent 
than the animosities between schools of med- 
icine. Science also has had its conflicts, 
sects, wars, martyrs — nor have its martyrs 
always been killed by the church. The Co- 
33 



Science as 
Discoverer 
and Inter- 
preter 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

pernican view of the universe, the undula- 
tory theory of light, the circulation of the 
blood, the doctrine of evolution, — these are 
but a few of the battlefields of science. 

In very fact, science, like religion, is but 
an interpreter of facts existent in the uni- 
verse long before the interpreter existed, 
and has been not less slow and uncertain 
in reaching toward first truths. It is only 
within the past century that we have really 
read out from Christ's Gospel the full mean- 
ing of the brotherhood of man, and so abol- 
ished slavery ; it is only within the past gen- 
eration that we have read out from God's 
Nature the force of electricity, which we 
begin to find is perhaps the dominant force 
of forces, and applied it to human use. 
Truth has not varied ; the face of Nature 
and of Nature's God remain the same, yes- 
terday, to-day, and forever ; but man, the im- 
perfect instrument of perception, of interpre- 
tation, has been opening his inward eyes and 
his unfolding mind. 

We come thus to some light upon the 

problem of evil. It is the light of law, the 

mining Law j^^ ^j Nature, a divine law, which is the 

essence of the universe. It may be that we 

err in speaking of God as omnipotent, in the 

34 



Predeter- 



OF RELIGION 

sense that He is superior or acts contrary to 
law. In the nature of things, by definition, 
two and two make four, a straight line is the 
shortest distance between two points, a cause 
produces result. This nature of things God 
cannot, or does not, change. It is predesti- 
nation. It is within and by means of law 
that the Great Law-giver is potent, over all 
things material and spiritual, which proceed 
from this law. And it is the law of His laws 
that His creation is not a perfected, but a 
perfecting, universe. We can conceive of an A perfect- 
earth without mountains and valleys, with- i^g Universe 
out threatening cliffs or yawning chasms, 
or treacherous quagmires, or barren "bad 
lands,'' an earth all an even plain or undulat- 
ing park -land, with fairly distributed forest, 
with showers at exact intervals feeding rivers 
that run evenly into a stormless sea, an earth 
without darkness and bitter cold, or glare of 
light and scorching heat, an earth inhabited 
only by animals, the friends of man, and by 
perfected man himself, the conflict of the 
carnivora forever over, and all life supported 
on the spontaneous fruits of the field, with- 
out waste or loss, sorrow or pain, disease or 
death. But against this harping heaven the 
human imagination has always been in revolt. 

35 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

Somehow, we prefer a world which throbs, 
an earth with mountains and valleys, with 
difficulties and dangers, with ups and downs, 
material and spiritual, in which the throes of 
birth are followed by the pangs of death, and 
life succeeds. As no mortal has ever designed 
a new form of leaf or flower that is beautiful, 
so no mortal has ever designed, even to his 
own suiting, a working world without the im- 
perfections of this. 

But in this imperfect world, law itself 
The Tra- works out evil. Though justice reigns, in- 
ge yo VI jyg^.j^g exists. Evil is a fact. We cannot 
rid ourselves of the fact by calling it a shadow 
and a seeming, except as good also, with all 
things, is a seeming. The law of gravitation, 
which binds the solid rocks together, dashes 
to cruel death or yet more cruel death-in-life, 
the innocent child who toddles over the face 
of the cliff. The lightnings, the winds, the 
floods that keep the earth pure and sweet as 
the habitation of man, doom to disaster and 
death the most provident and the most virtu- 
ous. The tragedy of CEdipus, innocently 
fore-doomed to woe unutterable ; the tragedy 
of Gretchen, surrendering self to exalting 
love ; the tragedy of Tess, betrayed by duty 
itself into the toils of lust, — these are im- 

36 



OF RELIGION 

mortal, because from generation to genera- 
tion, such cruel facts repeat themselves in 
life. The individual is crushed, betrayed, 
doomed, by the very forces which conserve 
the race. 

Yet these are but the spots on the sun's 
face. The order of nature is not, in general, Life out of 
cruel. Life, indeed, feeds on death ; man ^^^^^ 
destroys life for his own food, as the animals 
below him have in their turn destroyed. But 
such death is not a cloud that foredooms life 
with blackening shadow. Self-preservation is 
doubtless a controlling instinct, but the life 
of the animal is lived in hours of delight af- 
ter its kind. The lurid pictures of the earth 
as a great killing-ground, in which poor, 
hunted things dwell forever in terror of their 
lives, is as unnatural a generalization as to 
judge human happiness from the story of an 
GEdipus or a Tess. Races, classes, are happy 
in their ^'station of life,*' however they may 
lack those conditions necessary to give their 
analyst his happiness. The last of a dying 
race, of man or beast, may not in personal 
being be unhappy. Most individuals have in 
their lives more joy in being than pain in 
suffering. And few, even in the most miser- 
able of human lives, are without hope in the 
37 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

world. What wrecks of humanity have in- 
deed been floated off the rocks by buoyant 
helpfulness of other men, and brought in 
safety into the haven of peace. Not evil, but 
good, survives. 

When, therefore, we balance facts, the ex- 
The Bal- istence of evil in this world is not a negation, 
Fac^s° ^ denial, of the goodness of God, though it 

may limit His omnipotence of goodness. It 
remains to the human mind a problem, and 
one of the insoluble problems. We come to 
think of it, in the chemistry of being, as the 
chemist comes to think of those wonderful 
re-agents which, from the simplest life-giving 
elements, combine atoms into a complex sub- 
stance, which may be at once the deadly foe 
of life and the most preventive or curative of 
remedies against disintegration and death. 
Alcohol, ether, carbolic acid, are such sub- 
stances. They are the servants of man, but 
also they slay. The drunkard whose first 
thirst for drink comes from the hospital med- 
icine, the patient dying upon the operating 
table, the child, or the suicide, who swallows 
from the bottle of disinfectant, — these vic- 
tims, innocent or self-doomed, as it may be, 
cannot cause us to forget the great good that 
has come to humankind from the application 
38 



OF RELIGION 

of these gifts of nature, discovered by man in 
God's universe. 

Finally, to every man who faces facts, the 
facts show that the dominant power in this The Domi- 
human world, whether called God, or Law, R^ghteous- 
or Fate, or Nature, is a power that makes for ness 
righteousness, and that to obtain the full 
good of life, literally to make the best of it, 
we must put our thinking, willing, and doing 
in line with that power. The development 
of life is a moral, not an immoral or an un- 
moral, development. There are episodes in 
a life when neither reason nor science gives 
clear guiding, where to do evil that good 
may come seems the wise course, — yet every 
man knows that these are at worst excep- 
tions to the law of life. To "go it while 
you're young'' in the pursuit of happiness 
is seen to be "a poor bargain with the devil." 
Happiness, in the lowest sense, is in the long 
run a matter of morals, of morahy in the 
highest sense. Those moments of infinite 
rapture, in the old-fashioned novel, which 
seem an eternity, constitute as a matter of 
fact a very short eternity, and are indeed 
but a small part of life. A happy life is lived 
through years of ups and downs, each of 

39 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

which years has three hundred and sixty-five 
days of twenty-four hours each. A health- 
ful body, a content mind, an aspiring soul, 
make full happiness. If the body is health- 
ful by heredity, a true regimen in line with 
'' righteousness '' keeps it so ; if by heredity 
it is unhealthy, the same regimen will at 
least better its condition, and to that extent 
induce happiness. 

The questions of the origin of man are in 
The practi- this reading ^'academic.'' Whether for mil- 
of^Life^^^"^ lions of years this earth, appointed among 
myriads of stars for the habitation of man, 
has been a-making for him, under the direct 
personal guidance of a God in whose image 
man is made, or whether, under the large 
law which rules the universe, a time has 
come on this earth, as it comes on greater 
stars, when development blossoms into hu- 
manity, the fact remains the same, — that 
here is man, environed by circumstances 
which in part control him and which in part 
he controls. His problem — and the pro- 
blem of each of his race — is the same in 
either course. And this is measurably true 
also as to his destiny. We say rightly of 
many lives that they are ill requited, ill ad- 
justed, unless they are continued into another 
40 



OF RELIGION 

world, where wrongs of to-day may be trans- 
lated into the eternal right. Yet, if all hope 
of that future life is put aside, we discern 
clearly enough that the way in this life is *' to 
make the desl of it," and that to go contrary 
to rightness is to invite more ill. The samq 
living which best fits a man for a life with- 
out end best fits him for a life which ends in 
this world. 

But if religion is true, why is it not one ? 
if Christianity is the Truth, why is the Truth Why is not 
divided against itself ? Religion has in fact ^^^^f ^°^ 
been too often an antagonism instead of a 
communion. It has been an art of polemics 
rather than of irenics : the last word is 
scarcely to be found in the theological dic- 
tionaries. The American maiden who told 
the Pope that he must like her country be- 
cause it was the most religious in the world 
— for it had most "denominations," was not 
without historic basis for her notion. Men 
have seemed to seek whereon they might dis- 
agree. Three great reHgions still divide the The three 
world. Buddhism is divided into a multitude ^g^ons^^" 
of sects, on lines of division geographic, meta- 
physical, ritualistic, from the papalism of the 
Grand Lama of Thibet to the reforming sim- 
41 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

plicity of the truer followers of the Buddha. 
Mohammedanism has its lines of cleavage, on 
the genealogies of the Caliph successors of 
" the Prophet of God ; '' and in the schools, 
endlessly subdivided, of the four great Imans 
who have expounded the Koran ; and it finds 
its protestant reformers in the Wahabee 
zealots. Religion has been indeed the blood- 
iest battlefield of mankind. Christianity has 
warred against Islam, and not conquered; 
and within itself is the confounding of " the 
peace of the church." What witness, then, 
does history bear to the truth of religion, of 
Christianity itself ? Is it not disproof ? No, 
for the light is not less light when refracted 
into colors which each man sees for himself. 
The differences are not in the nature of God, 
but in the nature of man. 

There are not many Gods, many Christs, 

The real many religions. The one God, most of us 

Reunion believe, has developed through the ages the 

supreme race of man. But of this race are 

many races, diverse, with minds and spirits 

of many kinds. The human mind is one, 

but its expression in speech, even though it 

may have been one in the beginning, tends 

to infinite variety. As men know more 

of speech, they come to know each other's 

42 



OF RELIGION 

speech and to see, in all speech, laws or forms 
or words common to all or to many. Thus 
God, expressed to these diverse races and 
many minds, is and will always seem of many 
forms, seen under conditions which are con- 
ditions of the seeing, not of the Seen. Thus 
doctrines, or statements of what each kind of 
man thinks about God, become the founda- 
tions of sects. And because it is the wont 
of men to talk about their differences rather 
than about the agreements that go without . 
saying, they build fences about their own 
fields of religion and think of these, instead 
of the great and beautiful plain which under- 
lies them all. But those of far sight and 
fair eye are coming more and more to see 
how lovely is the land without the fences. 

Christ brake bread and drank wine with 
his chosen friends, with every-day bread and Sect Forma- 
wine of his time, in that brave and touching ^^^^^^^^^ 
scene of the Last Supper : from this has 
come the gorgeous ceremonial of the Roman 
Mass, translated into the liturgy of the 
Church of England ; the doctrines of Tran- 
substantiation of the Host and the Blood ; 
the separatist exclusion of close Communion ; 
the practice of excommunication ; and the 
superstition of thirteen at table. Christ 
43 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

dedicated himself to his work, at the hands 
of another, with the lovely symbol of water : 
from that has come the sacerdotal rite of 
Baptism, wrangles innumerable over im- 
mersion and sprinkling, over the baptism of 
infants and the doom of the unbaptized, con- 
fusions of Anabaptists and Pedobaptists, and 
a hundred sectaries amongst sects. Christ 
spoke of God as his Father, and in warfares 
over Trinity and Unity, in creeds where 
words were used to conceal the absence of 
thought, the brotherhood of man was long 
forgotten. Christ charged his friends to 
continue his work, and the simple organiza- 
tion which they adopted has been made the 
basis of hierarchies, episcopates, presbyteries, 
monastic orders, and endless varieties of 
church government, which in strong forms 
and in strong hands became tyrannies, and in 
weak forms and in weak hands a confusion 
of tongues. 

Against this tendency of all religions to a 

The formal and physical crystallization, it has ever 

Reformer ^^^^ ^^^ mission of the religious reformer 

to protest, in defense of a more spiritual and 

less conventional devotion. So Christ against 

the Pharisaic Jews, Buddha in Brahmanism, 

Mahomet with his idolatrous compatriots 

44 



OF RELIGION 

and against a debased Judaism and Christian- 
ity. In like manner, over against this ex- 
treme and that vagary, there have arisen, 
from time to time, reformers within the 
Christian church, seeking to turn it from spe- 
cific errors or to bring it back to primitive 
simplicity. Thus Paul among the Judaiz- 
ing Christians. Thus Luther. Thus Calvin. 
Thus Edwards. Thus Wesley. Each in his 
turn did his great work for God in his world. 
Each of these later men in his turn swung 
the pendulum too far in his own direction, 
and made a new sect, " a new wound in the 
body of Christ, a new rent in his seamless 
garment.*' Then came the Friends, bearing The Friends 
testimony of the Inner Light, putting aside 
communion and baptism because these had 
come between man and God, and in the spirit 
of the meek and simple Christ, seeking to 
dwell at peace with all men, in the simplest 
of religious democracies. These were the 
true individualists. But their very contrast 
of simplicity became a form ; they too became 
a sect, persecuted even unto death by other 
sects. Catholic and Protestant alike ; and no 
sooner were they crystallized by this outward 
pressure into a definite church body than 
they too** split,'' on the rock of the Trinita- 
45 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

rian controversy, into orthodox and Hicksite. 
But to all Christians the Friends brought 
a true thought, which has been a leaven 
throughout all the churches. 

Within the nineteenth century there have 
New Sects not been lacking new sects, seeking each in 
its own way to bring back the church to 
what the sectaries sincerely believe to be a 
true faith or form. The Millerite delusion 
overswept the whole country, and numerous 
bands, clothed only in ascension white, waited 
again and again, on days specified only to be 
postponed, the second coming of the Lord. 
The Mormon leader of this century, like the 
Mahomet of a millennium ago, organized a 
new church on a new revelation, a super- 
structure on Christian foundations. The vota- 
ries of both, whatever the leaders, were sin- 
cere believers, and found in their faith a true 
religion. The C>^n>/-ians, so-called, sought 
to bring back Christianity to Christ. The 
Abolitionists found a religion in their holy 
cause. The Christian Scientists of to-day, 
emphasizing the healing power associated in 
the Gospels with Christ, build, upon a curious 
mixture of metaphysics and theology, a prac- 
tical working religion, with a devotional ser- 
vice of primitive simplicity, which preaches 
46 



OF RELIGION 

a true gospel of mental and spiritual disci- 
pline as the conditions of bodily health, and 
has brought real Christlikeness to many- 
thousands of disheartened and perplexed 
members of the Christian church. 

It is not reasonable to suppose that all 
men will come to think alike about God, or Men will not 
about Christ, or about religion. As long as *^^^^ ^^^^® 
there are differences in the form and doctrine 
of religion, the Roman church, or its equiva- 
lent, giving to certain kinds of people a 
richly symbolized and pictureful expression 
of religion, relieving them of individual pro- 
blems by furnishing priestly interpreters of 
infallible omniscience, may always exist, for 
it meets one great human need. The religion 
of individual relationship with God, of indi- 
vidual struggle and crisis, meets other needs, 
and is expressed in sects according as one 
or another feature or doctrine of the reli- 
gious life is emphasized. Thus the Catholic 
church, one and indivisible, exists coordinate 
with individualist sects, reformed and always 
re-forming, — and this difference may, by the 
nature of the human mind, continue, perhaps 
always, to exist. But, beyond all varieties of 
faith and of form, there is a unity in the 
brotherhood of man, reverent of its divine 

47 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

origin, in which more and more all faiths and 
all forms agree as the essence of religion. 
''Religions may die; religion lives/' 

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre at 
Jerusalem, built about the rock in which, 
The Church as Latins, Greeks, and Armenians alike be- 
Sepulchre^ lieve, the body of Jesus was entombed, con- 
tains within its walls chapels for each of 
these orders of Christians. It has been a 
sad epitome of the history of the church of 
Christ. Confusion of tongues, diverse ritu- 
als, conflicting holy days, din of discordant 
preachers, babble of gossip and contention, 
treachery and violence, have culminated 
more than once within Holy Week itself in 
murder and massacre, until the soldiers of 
the infidel Turk have been called in to pre- 
vent war among the Christian disciples of 
the Prince of Peace, in the very Holy City 
of the Jews where Christ is not yet owned 
because his professed disciples know him 
not. But it is also the parable of the true 
and possible church, in which each form of 
religion may have its appointed place, but 
under whose over-arching dome all Chris- 
tians may unite in listening to the risen 
Truth, while Jew and Gentile, believer or 
agnostic, may find in the peace within, some- 

48 



OF RELIGION 

thing that answers to their spiritual need and 
brings each nearer to the divine. 

If this rehgion, the religion of Christ, the 
religion which accepts Christliness in all Failures 
faiths and forms, though it be for all time churches 
and all times, must change, like all expres- 
sions of the divine through the human, in its 
expression, its organization, its methods, to 
conform with the conditions and answer the 
demands of each age, of each generation, of 
each type of mind or kind of soul, meeting 
with the eternal verities the needs of the 
passing hour, it behooves Christians to look 
facts in the face and learn where and why 
churches have failed. When the holy day 
becomes merely a holiday, not for re-creation 
but for amusement only ; when neither the 
Bible nor other spiritual literature gives gos- 
pel to men, but the Sunday newspaper takes 
their place; when church meetings cannot 
withstand the competition of the cheap thea- 
tres in our cities or overcome the inertia of 
country life ; when heads of churches are no 
longer men of religion but of affairs, and a 
spiritual teacher may be cast out because he 
does not draw to the pews a ''paying'* con- 
gregation; when churches have no longer 
49 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

the religious vitality in their public opinion 
to reform or to discipline those who pay high 
prices for pews and hold high place in church 
politics, but are anti-Christ in daily life; 
when worship becomes ritual and prayer a 
form ; when, in short, the church is no longer 
religious, — there is no longer answer within 
the churches to that need, dwelling within 
every soul, however dormant, for the things 
of the spirit. For "man is a religious ani- 
mal '* and craves spiritual food. No plea of 
"lack of time '' can condone the failure of 
the churches, for in this hurried world of 
our day each man works fewer hours to earn 
a better living than in the olden times " of 
leisure,'' and has still "all the time there is." 
It is still a matter of choice. The dried 
husks of religion will never invite nor satisfy 
the hungry souls that flocked to hear a Phil- 
lips Brooks, for whom time was never lack- 
ing, morning or noon or night, to seek spir- 
itual food at his hands. 

It may be that religion, like government, 
The Differ- has suffered, in this period of transition, from 
the lapse of individualist relations which has 
followed the development of great organiza- 
tions. The chief of a state, the head of a 
50 



entiation of 
Functions 



OF RELIGION 

great industry, no longer knows citizens and 
workers in their individual relations, but di- 
rects the mass. The shepherd of a thousand 
sheep cannot know his own and call each by 
its name. The preacher who attracts a thou- 
sand hearers into a great church-house can- 
not be the pastor of a thousand souls. The 
Pope, as the head of the great Roman hier- 
archy, dispenses religion as it were at whole- 
sale. The Protestant bishop is an executive, 
no longer distinctly a godly man, but a man 
of the world, of affairs, whose conversation is 
not of religion but of everything else. To 
this extent, the church has recognized, some- 
what to the bewilderment of its people, the 
differentiation of functions or of duties which 
has developed elsewhere in modern life. 

But few Protestant churches have followed 
the example of Plymouth Church in provid- Pastor and 
ing a pastor as well as a preacher. The *' min- 
ister of religion '' must be orator, organizer, 
executive, spiritual adviser, and comforter, 
in one. But to few men is it given to be all 
these : Phillips Brookses are rare. The Ro- 
man church with its superb organization has 
more availed itself of this principle of differ- 
entiation. The Puritans of New England 
had their preacher and their teacher for each 
51 



Preacher 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

church. When a church committee "calls" 
a new man, who will *'fill the pews " and be 
"heard of in the newspapers/' and disre- 
gards character and the quality of spiritual 
sympathy, expecting from him that which 
he cannot give, it commits a double wrong. 
And when the theological seminaries, fen- 
cing out men of large spirituality by narrow 
creeds, and inviting by unwise beneficences 
weaklings, spiritually and otherwise unfit, to 
secure a living in the church, send men out 
to strangle struggling churches at home or 
to misrepresent Christianity and misunder- 
stand paganism in the missionary field, the 
church is handicapped with a burden no 
other modern organization carries. 

A live and life-giving church must offer to 

The true men a living Christ, whose " second coming " 

tiie^Hv^ng^ is visible in the lives of disciples in whom 

Christ his spirit is ever-present. It proves itself by 

doing the Master's work, fulfilling in its day 

his mission to men. A church of Christ 

should create a Christ-like environment for 

those within its fold, helping these to be 

Christians in e very-day life, and should offer 

in its members a Christ-like example to those 

without, winning those to become Christians. 

In such an environment, each disciple is in- 

52 



OF RELIGION 

spired to discipline, to devotion, to achieve- 
ment toward likeness with Christ, and out of 
it should come the ideal, yet to be realized, 
of the Christian state. The primitive church, 
the Pilgrim fathers, the pioneer reformers in 
each Puritan movement before it convention- 
alized into sect, constituted literally a band 
of brethren in the bond of Christ, a spiritual A spirit- 
family, known each of all by his name, united "^^ Family 
in personal intimacy as well as by common 
purpose, having all things in common so far 
as necessary to respond to spiritual or phy- 
sical need, knowing no distinction of class 
within and reaching out to welcome into 
communion men of every class without, creat- 
ing thus a Christian environment, a possible 
millennium, in which outward circumstance, 
however hard the physical lot, ministered 
unto inward peace. The confessional of the 
Roman church, the crude relations of the 
Sunday-school teacher, the formal visitation 
of ^* the minister,'* are sorry substitutes for 
this heart-to-heart relationship, the touch of 
soul with soul, possible among such bands of 
disciples, in a sympathetic environment, by 
help of which religion is made applied ethics 
and the spirit is enabled to withstand in the 
struggles of daily life. 
53 



Church 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

It is natural that there should be '^ rites " 
Rites of the of the church, as of other organizations. 
Every society accepts or initiates its new- 
comers or novices with more or less of cere- 
mony, receives some formal enrollment or 
pledge, and holds festivals of communion or 
of commemoration. As the mystic gates 
from Eternity, through which the spirit incar- 
nated in body makes entrance and exit, open 
and close, in birth and death, it is the proper 
office of religion to give wel-come to the ar- 
riving and God-speed to the departing soul, in 
baptismal and funeral rites ; and the wedlock 
of man and woman, from whose union, the 
foundation of the home and of human soci- 
ety, is to come offspring of new life, should 
also have sanction from the church as a part 
of the divine order. But the churches, bid- 
den to seek and to save all men and to rejoice 
in the faith, have ever committed the dull 
and deadening error of making entrance or 
*' confirmation'' not a dedication but a defini- 
tion, profession not of desire to live the Christ- 
life but of intellectual belief in complex and 
contradictory creed, fencing out more than it 
gathered in ; of converting the memorial sup- 
per from a feast to which all are bidden into 
a sacerdotal ceremony excluding would-be 
54 



OF RELIGION 

guests ; of marking the exit of the believer 
into eternal life with trappings of woe and 
lamentations of penitential grief. Christ in- Fences of 
vited the multitude to flock to him on the ^^^^^^ 
open hillsides of Judea ; his ministers raise 
barbed-wire fences of creed and catechism 
even against the tender lambs who would 
seek shelter in his arms. The subtleties of 
the Nicene and the anathemas of the Atha- 
nasian creed, even the phantasmagoria of the 
simpler Apostles' Creed, so called, the " thirty- 
nine articles *' and the ^' shorter catechism,*' 
overlaid upon the religion of Christ, perplex 
and repel the thoughtful and candid soul, and 
condemn the pulpit, bound by conscience to 
expositions against which conscience revolts, 
to verbal dexterities and logical evasions 
which are both irreligious and immoral. 

The creeds and articles of the sects are not 
the only survivals from a dead past which Supersti-^ 
afflict the church and must pass away. Sacri- ^^^^^ ^ ^" 
fice, ceremonial, intercession, have been the 
vicarious exercises of religion by which a 
priestly class, from medicine-man to Roman 
priest, came between men and God. Fear, 
lording the savage mind and super-stitious 
into our own day, imaged a God of Wrath 
and Death, whose anger was to be appeased 
55 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

by taking life — the slaughter of enemies, the 
sacrifice of children, the burnt-offerings of 
flesh — and ungrudgingly paid taxes, in blood- 
money or tithes, for hire of those who could 
ward off His terrors. For to Ignorance the 
unusual in Nature — the storm, the flying 
comet, the stroke of death — is the striking 
fact, unmindful as it is of the sunshine and 
the starlight in which Nature usually abides 
and which suggests in the reflecting mind 
the smile of a God of Love and Life. To us 
it is not waste, but use, that pleases God ; 
sacrifice gives place to service. The abnega- 
tion of monks, as St. Simon on his pillar, or 
he who in the Russian Lavra lived his useless 
days immured in earth to his neck, is no 
Priestcraft longer religious. That power of the priest- 
hood, the tool of statecraft, to invoke destruc- 
tion of the disobedient, as when Moses is 
said to have punished the democratic revolt 
of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram by causing 
them, "even to their little ones,'* to be swal- 
lowed up by the earth, is passing out of human 
belief, and with it *'the forgiveness of sins'* 
by a vicarious absolution. So, too, that view 
of prayer which makes it a special appeal to 
Deity to abrogate His Laws in our favor or 
against our adversaries, and with it will pass, 

56 



OF RELIGION 

let us hope, the habit of taking His name in 
vain in so-called prayer to expatiate upon and The Mock- 
explain the happenings of the day or to parade p^y^^ 
" the finest prayer ever addressed to a fashion- 
able audience '' or the weary waste of words 
of the prayer-meeting Pharisee. When, in 
the Mexican revolution, the revolutionists, 
under the white banner of Our Lady of 
Guadaloupe and the *' powers ordained of 
God," with the sacred image of Our Lady 
of Los Remedios, looked to this same *' Mo- 
ther of God'* to invoke victory for each 
against the other ; when, in the Cuban war, 
Catholic priests and Protestant ministers on 
either side, American and Spanish, vied in 
adjuring their common God of peace to over- 
whelm His, meaning their, enemies ; when a 
community beseeches the Lord of Righteous- 
ness to " direct and prosper, for the safety, 
honor, and welfare of His people all the con- 
sultations '' of a body to which it has sent an 
unrighteous representative ; when a church 
begs the Law-giver of Nature to "restrain 
these immoderate rains'' and "send us sea- 
sonable weather," — then prayer becomes a 
mockery, provoking the inward derision even 
of the most religious, and is no longer a reli- 
gious exercise. 

57 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

But despite perversions of rites and of reli- 
The Exer- gious observances, the exercises of religion 
H ^k)n°^ ^^" must remain a part of life so long as the 
spiritual nature remains a part of man. It is 
still true that human beings need, and are 
likely always to need, means of spiritual ex- 
pression and communion which shall satisfy 
the hunger of the soul. The exercise of reli- 
gion implies food and regimen. The spiritual 
man, like the physical man, needs nourish- 
ment and discipline, aids internal and exter- 
nal, to assure wholeness of life. What the 
great apostle means by faith and works, the 
uplifting of the soul toward the heights as 
well as the daily toiling on the plain, are 
necessary parts of the religious life. Service, 
worship, prayer, are natural means of spirit- 
ual development. For service only, the gos- 
pel of works, that love and duty towards our 
neighbor which is the best fulfillment of love 
and duty toward God, though the practical 
side of religion, is not enough. Mere altruism 
is not all. Man, as a social being, craves 
expression in common of his religious or ethi- 
cal aspirations, as in public worship, no less 
than individual uplifting, as in private prayer. 
As in social celebration, or on political oc- 
casion, men gather for the expression of com- 

58 



OF RELIGION 

mon thought or aim, hearing together the Church Lit- 
inspiring thoughts written aforetime, join- ^^S^^^ 
ing in song, renewing fidelity to their com- 
mon cause, gaining new inspiration from the 
winged words of an '* orator of the day,'' so 
religion answers a like need in a like way, 
developing this natural "order of exercises'* 
into rich liturgy, or confining it to Puritan 
simplicity. When men are not repelled by 
dry form and rigid creed, but are offered 
the bre^d of righteousness and the water of 
life that answer to the spiritual hunger and 
thirst in every man, it is not duty that drives 
them to church but desire that speeds them, 
as a lover to his beloved. To the feast of 
the spirit all men come gladly, if they are but 
rightly bidden ; rehgion need hold no second 
place after business, politics, society, amuse- 
ment. To Phillips Brooks, preaching in 
Trinity Church at noon-time. Wall Street 
flocked. 

The great preacher has always his mis- 
sion and his hearers, and, though from the Preaching 
pulpit of sect, he preaches to the church 
catholic, not theology but religion, not doc- 
trine but devotion, "not creed but Christ." 
It is not given to all preachers to be, nor to 
all hearers to hear, a Beecher or a Spurgeon, 
59 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

yet men have only to be awakened by the 
enthusiasm, the God-in-us, of a religious re- 
form or the force, too often crude and fleet- 
ing, of a " revival '* of religion, to ** crowd 
the churches *' of humblest pulpits. And it 
should not be forgotten that every preacher 
of righteousness, from platform as from pul- 
pit, is to-day, as of old, a prophet of God, aid- 
ing in the development of character, personal 
or national, toward the spiritual life. The 
spoken word kindles as the written word does 
not, and every man is the better for join- 
ing in the assembling of the people together, 
with uplift of common rejoicing, in '* psalms 
Spiritual and hymns and spiritual songs.'' In the 
Songs richer forms of public worship, noble music, 

art, and architecture perform their splendid 
part as accessories of religion, but are a poor 
substitute for it when they become the idols 
of the church. As for doctrine, whereon 
men agree to disagree, and the study of the 
scriptures in its light, it may be that this will 
become the function of smaller organizations 
of fellow-believers within the greater church, 
as chapels in a great cathedral, in whose 
class-rooms the teacher of righteousness ex- 
pounds to men like-minded with himself their 
view of truth. 

60 



OF RELIGION 

The seeker after God, the student of the 
spiritual life, who obtains inspiration in the Prayer 
common joy and instruction from his spirit- 
ual teacher, needs not the less the private aids 
of prayer and meditation. As the thought of 
God changes from a Boss or Joss to be pla- 
cated and besought for favors, to a Divine 
Power ruling the universe by laws of right- 
eousness, there comes a like change in the 
thought of prayer. True prayer, whether in 
speech or in silence, public or private, is a 
communing with the divine, a meditation on 
divine knowledge, a recognition of divine 
laws, an aspiration toward divine being, rais- 
ing the soul into active harmony with the 
divine order, and is in this sense the more an 
active part of religion as the vital relation- 
ship of each soul with the divine is recog- 
nized as the essence of religion. The office 
of prayer is not to beg God to stoop to men, 
but to uplift men toward God. 

Both in public worship and private medita- 
tion, man finds spiritual food in the sacred Sacred 
literature of the past and of the present, — Books 
in the reflections of the divine thought in 
our own Book of Books, seen not as infallible 
and perplexing dogma but as the record of a 
religious yet errant race, in the Bibles of 
6i 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

other religions, in the holy books of all times, 
in the uplifting literature of great poets and 
great thinkers, in all scriptures that make for 
good. These are the seed-thoughts which, 
germinating in the meditations of the devout 
mind, produce the flowers and fruits of spirit- 
ual blessing. And not least the contempla- 
Nature tion of Nature and the study of its law, as 
developed in science, in which shines out 
the order and law of divine mind, are dis- 
tinctly, to him who sees and reads aright, an 
exercise of religion. For there is no vista 
opening more directly toward the conception 
of a pre-ordered development under divine 
thought than that which sees the evolution 
of the material world from nebulous "star- 
dust '' into suns and planets, becoming in 
our own earth the home of life, developed by 
the wonderful principle of natural selection 
at last into man, paramount through mind, 
with whose advent there came newly into 
action the principle also of ethical selection, 
and who began to coordinate and modify 
and conquer Nature by mind, to compass 
the earth and set bounds to merely natural 
forces, until Nature is no longer the lord of 
life, but life the lord of Nature. 



62 



OF RELIGION 

This we come to see at the last — that the 
godly life, the Christian life, the religious The godly 
life, may be lived in sincere unity amidst and ^^^® 
amongst all these diversities of theological 
doctrine and ceremonial expression. The 
Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man 
in Christ, are doctrines on which all Chris- 
tians agree, but there is a still wider basis of 
agreement on which also non-Christians may 
stand. The goodly life is the godly life. Right 
living is at once the condition and the aim of 
a true religion. We hear talk of the need of 
a new religion. But we have only to practice 
the old. Freed from the accretions and con- 
ventionalities of doctrine and of form that are 
part of a dead past, the barnacles of the cen- 
turies, the old religion is found to suffice abun- 
dantly for the new times. " Do I think Chris- 
tianity a failure ? — I think it has not been 
tried ! *' said the great Jewish rabbi. To live 
like Christ has been throughout the Christian 
centuries a sufficing religion. Wars have been 
fought over definitions of God; ceremonial 
usages have been evolved from Christ's sim- 
plest acts ; doctrines diverse and contrary have 
been read into His words as the basis of ana- 
themas, — but it is the life of the Christ, in 
its simplest teaching, that has been the suffi- 

63 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

cient model for all time. The way of the 
Christ is still the way of life. 

To live the Christ-life amid the complexities 
" What and perplexities of modern living is indeed no 

would Jesus ^^gy endeavor. The question, " What would 
Jesus do ? " is sometimes easier asked than 
answered. We wish, for instance, to feed the 
hungry but not to promote pauperism — and 
so we must have our charity organization so- 
cieties, and as an act of charity must refrain 
from an act of love. We seek to uplift our fel- 
lows by abolishing industrial slavery and or- 
ganizing free labor, but not to develop a new 
despotism of trade unionism. We must think 
not only of the motive but of the effects 
of what we mean to be Christ-like actions. It 
requires indeed wide vision to apply the prin- 
ciple of guidance that we must work in line 
with the power that makes for righteousness, 
the work of good — and yet the Christ-life is 
the key to our living as to all living. 

And when the Christ-life is simply seen, 
Christ-like- and its teachings simply read, it becomes 
Christi^nhy^ known to us that this life and these teachings 
are a Bible of which there have been many 
translations, however imperfect, in other 
toRgues and in other ages. Thus the fol- 
lower of Christ finds Christ's likeness in the 

64 



OF RELIGION 

fellowship of the earlier Buddha and sees re- 
flections of his teachings in the Koran of the 
later Mahomet. Though to us of Christian 
faith, Christ, the supreme fulfillment in human 
form of the divine spirit, is the Way-shower 
above all who in less measure have been filled 
with the spirit of God, it becomes evident, as 
we know more and think more about the reli- 
gion of others, that any great religious teacher 
is a leader in the upward path. The Christian 
may not despise those who follow the teach- 
ers of their race in paths leading where Christ 
led, or disdain those who practice a Christian 
virtue better than himself. The followers 
of Buddha have no need for societies for the 
prevention of cruelty to man or beast, nor 
those of Mahomet for temperance movements 
and prohibition parties. We need not become 
Buddhists to learn from Buddha, or Maho- 
metans to seek what Mahomet may have to 
teach, nor join each Christian sect to get good 
from the precept or practice of Romanist, An- 
glican, Methodist, Quaker, or Christian Sci- 
entist. 

As the Christ had his forerunner in John 
and his interpreter in Paul, so in a wider Non-Chris- 
vision, the earlier Buddha and the later Ma- gfonf ^^'" 
homet had each his mission in the fulfillment 
65 



Buddha — 
**the noble 
Path" 



Mahomet 

the 

Reformer 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

of religion for the races of mankind. Buddha, 
seeking through the great renunciation a 
simpler way and a truer aim, failed, as all hu- 
man effort must fail, to satisfy with his doc- 
trine of Nirvana the insatiate desire of the 
finite mind to solve the problems of infinity, 
and his followers, as generations passed, di- 
vided like Christendom into innumerable 
sects, papal and protestant, idolized the de- 
stroyer of idols, and formalized a religion 
which was to free men from forms. But Bud- 
dha's " noble path " is not the less a way of 
virtue and of life, and his "silver rule '' the 
other statement of the "golden rule'' of 
Christ. Mahomet, fierce like the prophets 
of old with holy wrath against the idolatrous 
practices of his Arab brethren, and against 
Jews and Christians who had corrupted the 
pure monotheism of their fathers with super- 
stitions and idolatries innumerable and with 
ungodly life, fell before the temptation of 
world-conquest, and his religion became per- 
verted into fanaticism, fatalism, and sensual- 
ity. But the simplicity of the mosque and of 
the liturgy, in heed of his commands against 
graven images and idolatries, and the devo- 
tions of his people in every-day life, are not 
without their lessons for Christians. 

LofC. 



OF RELIGION 

To him who sees in all times and amongst 
all nations the workings of God in His world, The Bible 
it must be evident that the three great reli- 
gions which, originating within the compass 
of a thousand years, have divided the alle- 
giance of the great mass of mankind, must 
each have a real basis for their triumph ; that 
neither is true to the exclusion of the others, 
however supremely true may be our own 
faith ; and that in the truth underlying all 
and to which all point is the way of life. 
And in this same light, the Bible, our own 
Bible, in the *' newer criticism '' which makes 
it human as well as divine literature, is no 
longer an arsenal of weapons from which one 
adversary may slay another with contradic- 
tory " proof-texts '* and doom whole *' denom- 
inations '' to eternal perdition, but the re- 
cord of a race gifted above all others with 
the gift of religion, seeking after God, find- 
ing Him in the terrors of broken law and in 
the beneficences of law fulfilled, listening to 
His voice through Moses the great law-giver 
and that line of statesman who were prophets 
of his righteousness, until in Christ the Mes- 
siah came, at last, the fulfillment of the Law 
and the Prophets. 

In this new light the missionary impulse 
67 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

The is yet to find its full glory. At first denying 

g?^^^°^^^y to all men but the few the mercy of God, 
the churches presently sought to pluck ** hea- 
thenism '' out of the minds of half-developed 
men, and replace it with the Christianity of 
. civilization, as defined by each church in its 
own creed. That could not be done. The 
result was often disastrous. Creeds con- 
fused. The Buddhist, taught that Romanists 
in the sacrifice of the Mass ate the body and 
drank the blood of Christ, or misled by the 
atonement imagery, not less sanguinary, of 
Protestant hymns, considered Christians a 
kind of cannibals who "ate their God,'' from 
whom his reverence for life revolted in hor- 
ror. The Mahometan, confronted by the 
doctrine of the Three in One, by devotions 
before the images of Christ, the Virgin, and 
the Saints, and by the intoxication of men 
from Christian countries, was confirmed in 
his belief of the purity of his own religion, 
which knew only One God and kept him from 
idolatry and from drunkenness. The vices 
of civilization were often transplanted instead 
of its religion. Fire-water and firearms went 
with the Gospel of Peace. But now has 
come a better way — not to destroy but to 
develop, to find not only the agreements 
68 



OF RELIGION 

among Christians but between Christians The better 
and those of lesser light, that these may be ^^^ 
led into the clearer shining of the perfect 
day. The struggle is but begun, yet the 
result should be sure. Christian missionaries 
who are truly Christ-like and have truly the 
missionary spirit, will seek lovingly to inter- 
pret, instead of hatefully to misunderstand, 
the ceremonies, beliefs, and aspirations of the 
twilight peoples and make them bridges to- 
ward the faith of the perfect day. And in 
turn Christianity is receiving from other reli- 
gions their aid towards the higher life. The 
prayers from Egyptian temples, the teach- 
ings of Socrates and Plato, the thoughts of 
Marcus Aurelius, are helps to the devout 
life. Buddha joins forces with St. Francis 
of Assisi in teaching us to love our little 
brothers of the earth. The Orient contrib- 
utes to our sacred anthology, and its aspira- 
tions seem not out of place in Christian 
pulpits. 

All religions are useless, and the exer- 
cises of religion waste, if they do not show Religion 
their fruits, harvest after seedtime, in prac- Practical 
tical every-day life. He who is truly godly 
or good will not rest short of helping in his 

69 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

turn to increase good among his fellow-men, 
and in that sense at least bring them nearer 
to God, more in accord with divine order. 
In state as in church, in business as in soci- 
ety, — that is, in politics, trade, conversation, 
— religion must be known by its practical 
applications, in fulfilling the direct aim of 
religion, righteousness of life. And he who 
believes not in a "personar* God has not 
the less, indeed has the more, need to use all 
helps toward the spiritual life, which uplifts 
man from strength to strength, as on wings 
of eagles. 

All religions join with ethics, with philo- 
Soul sophy, with common sense, in emphasizing 

supreme f^j. ^-j^e soul, the spirit, supreme place in the 
making of man. And this necessity is shown 
by contraries. The most awful crime among 
the most hardened people, as the murder of 
a mistress from jealousy by a brutal outcast, 
witnesses to the strength of that personal 
individuality, dwelling in the body, yet not 
the body, which binds man to man. Friend- 
ship, love, hate, — these are relations not 
physical, but meta-physical, supra-material, 
spiritual, and they are supreme relations. 
The thought of the soul fighting with the 
body for supremacy is as old as life itself ; 
70 



OF RELIGION 

it is a thought in the Bibles of all peoples, 
and comes home to every man's experience. 
A modern sculptor has carven a group in 
which, joined as they touch the earth, the 
man spiritual with face alight in aspiration is 
seen struggling against the man physical, of 
form alike yet different, with face dull in 
brutishness. If the soul does not conquer, 
the body will. If the body conquers it 
dooms the soul to base subjection. If the 
soul conquers, the body follows its leadership 
into new life. The one is discord, the other 
harmony. It is only in the supremacy of the 
soul that life can be one, that man can live 
his life in unity with himself and with the 
Power that makes for righteousness. 

And which shall be conqueror is a question 
not so much of original gift as of training. The con- 
Despite heredity, men are born with possi- ^^^^^^s ^^"^ 
bilities of good, and may be educated, phy- 
sically or morally, to withstand and survive 
the seeds of ill. The soul may be an athlete 
or a weakling. Many a man, puny in body, 
with small gift of physical life, has out- 
stripped in the race of life his fellows of 
greater physical strength, by careful and 
well-willed development of a weak physique. 
So also has the soul choice. It may put itself 

71 



THE ARTS OF LIFE 

in line with the forces of good, or let itself 
go with the current of evil. It may be edu- 
cated, developed, quickened ; or it may be 
dulled, stunted, deadened. There must be 
training of the soul, by the exercise of spir- 
itual powers, lest there be atrophy of the 
man spiritual. It is sometimes true that the 
uplifting of the soul requires the crucifixion 
of the flesh — the eternal parable of the 
Cross. The waters of sensuality drown 
darkly the breath of spiritual life. Educa- 
tion is therefore a duty toward the soul. 
This the modern man too often forgets. 
The uplift- Being good, godly, to his fellow-man, he 
ing Spirit neglects to be good, or godly, within himself. 
Non-godliness, not ungodliness, is the con- 
dition of present-day living. But the exer- 
cises of religion are a vital part of life. In 
some form, the Sabbath, the Bible, worship, 
prayer, or their equivalents, belong with every 
well-ordered man and nation. Altruism may 
forget self, but self should not be forgotten. 
We owe a duty to ourselves, within ourselves, 
as well as without ourselves to our fellow- 
man. Religion redeems not destroys self. 
And the higher life uplifts the body itself 
into its most perfect wholeness and peace. 
Thus the higher and the lower motives con- 
72 



OF RELIGION 

join in the great unity that makes for right- 
eousness. And whether we think only of the 
life that now is, or also of the life that is to 
come, whether the pathway of being seems 
to any one of us to lead to the shut or to the 
open door, it is in the supremacy of the 
higher man, in the fulfillment of the supreme 
art of life, that life on earth is indeed worth 
the living. 



73 



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